The Scarlet Letter eBook

could have given them. With her knowledge of
a train of circumstances hidden from all others, she
could readily infer that, besides the legitimate action
of his own conscience, a terrible machinery had been
brought to bear, and was still operating, on Mr. Dimmesdale’s
well-being and repose. Knowing what this poor
fallen man had once been, her whole soul was moved
by the shuddering terror with which he had appealed
to her—­the outcast woman—­for
support against his instinctively discovered enemy.
She decided, moreover, that he had a right to her
utmost aid. Little accustomed, in her long seclusion
from society, to measure her ideas of right and wrong
by any standard external to herself, Hester saw—­or
seemed to see—­that there lay a responsibility
upon her in reference to the clergyman, which she owned
to no other, nor to the whole world besides.
The links that united her to the rest of humankind—­links
of flowers, or silk, or gold, or whatever the material—­had
all been broken. Here was the iron link of mutual
crime, which neither he nor she could break.
Like all other ties, it brought along with it its
obligations.

Hester Prynne did not now occupy precisely the same
position in which we beheld her during the earlier
periods of her ignominy. Years had come and gone.
Pearl was now seven years old. Her mother,
with the scarlet letter on her breast, glittering in
its fantastic embroidery, had long been a familiar
object to the townspeople. As is apt to be the
case when a person stands out in any prominence before
the community, and, at the same time, interferes neither
with public nor individual interests and convenience,
a species of general regard had ultimately grown up
in reference to Hester Prynne. It is to the credit
of human nature that, except where its selfishness
is brought into play, it loves more readily than it
hates. Hatred, by a gradual and quiet process,
will even be transformed to love, unless the change
be impeded by a continually new irritation of the
original feeling of hostility. In this matter
of Hester Prynne there was neither irritation nor
irksomeness. She never battled with the public,
but submitted uncomplainingly to its worst usage;
she made no claim upon it in requital for what she
suffered; she did not weigh upon its sympathies.
Then, also, the blameless purity of her life during
all these years in which she had been set apart to
infamy was reckoned largely in her favour. With
nothing now to lose, in the sight of mankind, and with
no hope, and seemingly no wish, of gaining anything,
it could only be a genuine regard for virtue that
had brought back the poor wanderer to its paths.